The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is the first great work of English literature that ordinary readers still enjoy for its own sake, and one of the great comic works of the world. Its premise is a pilgrimage: in April, around the year 1387, about thirty men and women gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, south of London Bridge, to ride sixty miles to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. To pass the time, the innkeeper proposes a storytelling contest. The tales they tell — courtly romances, dirty jokes, saints’ legends, animal fables, sermons, a parody of bad poetry — form an encyclopedia of medieval literature; and because each tale is fitted to the person who tells it, and the pilgrims quarrel, interrupt and answer one another, the work becomes something new: a drama of voices, a portrait of a whole society through the stories it tells.

Geoffrey Chaucer worked on it from about 1387 until his death in 1400 and never finished it. The original plan was enormous — two tales for each pilgrim on the way out, two on the way back, more than a hundred in all. Twenty-four survive, two of them deliberately broken off and two left incomplete. But what exists is enough to make it, as Dryden said, “God’s plenty”.

This page explains the frame and the pilgrims, tells the most important tales in summary, and describes the themes and debates that have kept the book alive for six hundred years.

At a glance

Written	c. 1387–1400, in Middle English (London dialect)
Form	Frame narrative; mostly in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, some in rhyme royal and other stanzas; two tales in prose
Manuscripts	Over 80 manuscripts survive; the finest are the Hengwrt and the lavishly illustrated Ellesmere (both early 1400s)
First printed	By William Caxton, c. 1476 — among the first books printed in England
Sources	Boccaccio’s Decameron (another story collection with a frame), French fabliaux, saints’ lives, Ovid, Boethius, sermons
Status	Unfinished: 24 tales in 10 “fragments” whose order is uncertain

The setting: pilgrimage and society

Pilgrimage to Canterbury was among the most popular religious practices of medieval England. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral in 1170 by four knights of Henry II; within three years he was canonised, and his shrine became famous for miracles of healing. Pilgrims went for devotion, for penance, for cures — and also, as Chaucer shows, for holiday, sightseeing, company and adventure. The opening lines link the season of spring, when nature revives and birds “slepen al the nyght with open ye”, with the human urge to travel:

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages… And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Medieval theory divided society into three estates: those who fight (the knights), those who pray (the clergy) and those who work (the peasants). Chaucer’s pilgrims include ideal representatives of each — the Knight, the Parson, the Ploughman — but most of them belong to groups that the old scheme could not fit: merchants, lawyers, doctors, guildsmen, a cook, a shipman, a widow of independent means. The Tales show a society in motion, in which money, trade and professional skill were reshaping the social order — the England of the years after the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt. Only the very highest (no lords) and the very lowest (no labourers in the fields beyond the idealised Ploughman) are absent.

The General Prologue

The General Prologue (858 lines) is the most famous part of the work. The narrator, Chaucer himself, tells how he was staying at the Tabard when “wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye” of pilgrims arrived, and he joined them. He then describes them, one by one, in a series of brief portraits that are the first great gallery of characters in English literature.

The Knight, a veteran of crusades from Prussia to Spain to the eastern Mediterranean, “a verray, parfit gentil knyght”, modest as a maid, still in his rust-stained tunic. His son the Squire, twenty, curly-haired, embroidered “as it were a meede / Al ful of fresshe floures”, who sings and dances all day and loves so hotly he sleeps no more than a nightingale. Their Yeoman, a forester in green.

The Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, head of a convent, with perfect table manners — “Ful semely after hir mete she raughte” — who weeps over a mouse caught in a trap and feeds her little dogs roast meat, and who wears a gold brooch inscribed Amor vincit omnia — “love conquers all” — which might mean the love of God or something else. The Monk, who should be in his cloister praying but loves hunting, fine horses and a fat swan roasted; “And I seyde his opinion was good,” says the narrator. The Friar, Hubert, a “wantowne and a merye” beggar-preacher who grants easy penance to those who pay, knows every tavern and barmaid, and has found husbands for many young women — at his own expense.

The Merchant, in his forked beard and Flemish beaver hat, who talks constantly of his profits and is secretly in debt. The Clerk of Oxford, a thin, threadbare student on a lean horse, who would rather have twenty books of Aristotle at his bed’s head than fine clothes: “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.” The Sergeant of the Law, busy — “And yet he semed bisier than he was”. The Franklin, a rich landowner and epicure in whose house “it snewed of mete and drynke”. Five Guildsmen and their Cook, who has an ulcer on his shin. The Shipman, a pirate-like sailor who sends his defeated enemies home “by water”. The Doctor of Physic, learned in astrology and the humours, who loves gold “for gold in phisik is a cordial”.

The Wife of Bath, Alisoun: a skilled cloth-maker, “somdel deef”, gap-toothed (a sign of lustfulness), with hose of fine scarlet and a hat as broad as a shield; she has had five husbands “at chirche dore, / Withouten oother compaignye in youthe”, and has been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times, to Rome, Boulogne, Santiago and Cologne. “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.”

The Parson, a poor country priest, “riche… of hooly thoght and werk”, who visits his scattered parishioners on foot in all weathers and teaches Christ’s lore, “but first he folwed it hymselve”. His brother the Ploughman, who has carted many a load of dung and lives in peace and charity.

Then the rogues: the Miller, Robin, a huge, brawny wrestler who can break down any door with his head, with a wart on his nose topped by red bristles and a mouth as wide as a furnace, who steals corn and plays the bagpipes; the Manciple, a steward who cheats the lawyers he serves; the Reeve, a thin, choleric estate-manager who has cheated his lord; the Summoner, a church-court officer with a fiery, pimpled face that frightens children, who takes bribes; and his companion the Pardoner, with lank yellow hair, glaring eyes and a goat’s voice, “a geldyng or a mare”, who carries a wallet “bretful of pardoun, comen from Rome al hoot” and a pillowcase he claims is Our Lady’s veil, and pigs’ bones he sells as saints’ relics.

Chaucer adds himself, and the Host, Harry Bailly, a big, bold, merry man, who proposes the game: each pilgrim will tell two tales going and two returning; whoever tells the tale of “best sentence and moost solaas” — most meaning and most delight — will win a supper at the Tabard paid for by the rest. He will ride with them as judge. They draw lots, and the Knight begins.

Throughout, the narrator’s tone is admiring and innocent. He praises the Monk’s and the Friar’s worldliness; he calls the corrupt Summoner “a gentil harlot and a kynde”. The irony — that we see what the narrator affects not to — is Chaucer’s signature.

The tales

The tales survive in ten fragments, linked within each by prologues and conversations; their order varies in the manuscripts. The story of the pilgrimage moves through them as follows.

The Knight begins, appropriately for the highest-ranking pilgrim, with a long, stately romance set in ancient Athens, adapted from Boccaccio. Two noble Theban cousins, Palamon and Arcite, imprisoned by Duke Theseus, see the beautiful Emelye walking in a garden from their tower window and both fall in love with her; their sworn brotherhood turns to deadly rivalry. Years later Theseus arranges a great tournament to decide between them; Arcite, who prayed to Mars for victory, wins, but is thrown by his horse at the moment of triumph through the intervention of Saturn and dies; Palamon, who prayed to Venus for the lady, marries Emelye. Theseus ends with a Boethian speech about the “faire cheyne of love” by which the First Mover binds the universe, and the need to “make vertu of necessitee.” It is a philosophical tale about order, chance and the gods’ cruelty.

The Host asks the Monk to follow, but the Miller, too drunk to sit his horse, insists on “quiting” (paying back) the Knight with a tale of his own. It is a fabliau — a bawdy comic tale — and one of the funniest stories in English. An old Oxford carpenter, John, has a lively eighteen-year-old wife, Alisoun; their lodger, the clever student Nicholas, persuades the carpenter that a second Flood is coming, so that John hangs three tubs from the rafters to float away in, and falls asleep in his; meanwhile Nicholas and Alisoun go to bed. The parish clerk Absolon, who also loves Alisoun, comes to her window at night begging a kiss; in the dark she presents her backside, and he kisses it. Enraged, he returns with a red-hot coulter (plough blade); Nicholas puts his backside out of the window and farts in Absolon’s face, and is branded. His cry of “Water!” wakes the carpenter, who thinks the Flood has come, cuts his rope, and crashes to the floor, breaking his arm — and the whole town laughs at him as mad. Every element of the plot, set up earlier, clicks into place in a perfect comic machine. It is also a parody of the Knight’s Tale: two young men compete for a woman, but in a world without gods or ideals.

The Reeve, who was a carpenter in his youth, takes offence and retaliates with a fabliau about a cheating miller humiliated by two Cambridge students, who sleep with his wife and daughter. The Cook begins a tale of a London apprentice that breaks off unfinished.

The Man of Law tells the pious tale of Constance, a Roman emperor’s daughter twice set adrift at sea by wicked mothers-in-law, preserved by Providence through every trial.

Then comes the Wife of Bath, whose prologue — longer than her tale — is one of Chaucer’s greatest creations. “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage,” she begins. She defends her five marriages against the Church’s teaching that virginity is best and that widows should not remarry, citing Scripture against the clerks with gusto: God told us to “wexe and multiplye”. She tells how she ruled her first three husbands, old and rich, by nagging, accusation and the withholding of sex; her fourth was a philanderer whom she made jealous in turn; her fifth, the young clerk Jankyn, twenty years old to her forty, whom she married for love, used to read aloud to her from his “book of wikked wyves” — a compendium of misogynist stories. One night she tore three pages from it and punched him; he struck her so hard on the ear that she went deaf. In the end he gave her the “governance” of house and land and burned the book, and after that they never argued. “Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?” she asks — if women had written the books, men would look worse than all the sons of Adam.

Her tale is an Arthurian romance. A knight of Arthur’s court rapes a maiden; the queen spares his life on condition that he discover, within a year and a day, “what thyng is it that wommen moost desiren.” He searches in vain until an ugly old woman offers him the answer in exchange for granting her next request. The answer — women most desire “sovereynetee” over their husbands — saves his life; her request is that he marry her. On their wedding night she lectures him on true nobility (“gentillesse”), which comes from virtue, not birth, and offers him a choice: to have her ugly and faithful, or young and beautiful and perhaps unfaithful. He leaves the choice to her — gives her the mastery — and she becomes both beautiful and faithful.

The Wife’s challenge launches what critics since George Lyman Kittredge (1912) have called the “marriage debate”, a group of tales about authority in marriage: the Clerk’s answer, the tale of patient Griselda, a peasant woman married to a marquis who tests her obedience by taking away her children and pretending to divorce her, which she bears without complaint (the Clerk adds that no wife should imitate her); the Merchant’s bitter tale of the old knight January, his young wife May and her lover in a pear tree; and the Franklin’s gentler tale of a marriage of mutual freedom and “trouthe” (keeping one’s word).

The Friar and the Summoner, who hate each other professionally, trade insulting tales — the Friar’s about a summoner who rides with the devil and is carried off to hell, the Summoner’s about a greedy friar tricked into receiving a fart divided equally among twelve friars.

The Pardoner, asked for a moral tale, first explains, with shameless pride, how he cheats simple people with his false relics and sermons: his theme is always Radix malorum est cupiditas — “greed is the root of all evil” — though he himself is greedy. “I preche of no thyng but for coveityse.” Then he tells a perfect moral exemplum: three young rioters in a tavern in time of plague set out to find and kill Death, who has slain their friend; an old man, who longs to die and cannot, tells them they will find Death under a tree; there they find a heap of gold florins. They wait for night to carry it away; the youngest goes to town for bread and wine and buys poison to kill the others; they kill him when he returns, then drink the poisoned wine. All three find Death. Having finished, the Pardoner — astonishingly — offers his relics to the pilgrims, starting with the Host, who answers with an obscene insult; the Knight makes them kiss and be friends. Critics have long debated whether this moment reveals the Pardoner’s despair, his contempt or his compulsion.

The Prioress tells a miracle of the Virgin about a little Christian boy murdered by Jews for singing a hymn — a tale whose antisemitism, common in medieval literature, troubles modern readers and is variously read as Chaucer’s or as a revelation of the Prioress’s sentimental cruelty.

Then the Host calls on Chaucer himself, who begins Sir Thopas, a galloping parody of popular romance in jingling rhyme, so bad that the Host stops him after a few stanzas: “Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!” Chaucer then tells a long, sober prose moral treatise, Melibee. The joke — that the author of the whole work is the worst poet in the company — is perfectly Chaucerian.

The Monk tells a series of brief “tragedies” of great men cast down by Fortune, from Lucifer and Adam to Nero and contemporary kings, until the Knight interrupts. The Nun’s Priest replies with the delightful beast fable of Chauntecleer, a magnificent rooster, and his favourite hen Pertelote. Chauntecleer dreams of a fox; Pertelote dismisses dreams as indigestion and prescribes laxatives; Chauntecleer cites learned authorities on prophetic dreams at great length — and is promptly seized by the fox, who flatters him into closing his eyes to sing. As the fox runs off pursued by the whole farmyard, Chauntecleer tricks the fox into opening his mouth to taunt the pursuers, and flies to safety. The tale is a mock-heroic parody of learned argument, courtly love and high rhetoric, and a moral about flattery.

The later fragments include the Second Nun’s life of St Cecilia, the Canon’s Yeoman’s exposé of alchemy, the Manciple’s tale of a tell-tale crow, and finally, as the pilgrims approach Canterbury in the late afternoon, the Parson, who refuses to tell a fable (“Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me”) and instead delivers a long prose sermon on penitence and the seven deadly sins. The book ends with Chaucer’s Retraction, in which he asks Christ to forgive him for his “worldly vanitees”, including “the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne”, and thanks God for his translations of Boethius and saints’ lives.

Themes

Society and the estates. The Tales are an “estates satire” that exceeds its genre. Chaucer satirises the corrupt clergy — Monk, Friar, Summoner, Pardoner — with particular sharpness, at a time when John Wycliffe was attacking Church wealth; but he also shows ideals, in the Knight, the Clerk, the Parson and the Ploughman. The rising middle classes, with their money and pretensions, receive the subtlest attention.

Experience against authority. Medieval culture rested on the authority of books — the Bible, the Church Fathers, the ancients. The Wife of Bath sets lived experience against them, and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale gently mocks learned argument. The tension runs through the whole work.

Marriage and women. The question of “maistrie” — who rules in marriage — and the nature of women dominate many tales. The Wife of Bath is read by some as a proto-feminist voice speaking back to clerical misogyny, by others as a comic embodiment of everything the misogynists said about women; perhaps she is both, and Chaucer leaves the question open.

Fiction and truth. The contest asks what makes a good story: “sentence” (meaning, moral) or “solaas” (pleasure)? The tales range from pure edification to pure entertainment, and the frame lets them comment on one another, so that no single voice has the last word — until the Parson and the Retraction, which reassert religious truth over fiction.

Pilgrimage. Beneath the comedy is the journey’s spiritual meaning: life itself as a pilgrimage to “Jerusalem celestial”, as the Parson says. The pilgrims never reach Canterbury in the text; the work ends on the road.

Interpretation and debate

Is Chaucer a satirist or a humane observer? A conservative defender of the three estates or a sly critic of all institutions? Does the “dramatic principle” — reading each tale as revealing its teller — illuminate the work, as G. L. Kittredge argued, or overreach? How far should we trust the narrator, and how far the Retraction? Feminist critics since the 1980s (Carolyn Dinshaw, Elaine Tuttle Hansen) have explored the Wife of Bath and the work’s gender politics; others have studied its treatment of Jews, of sexuality, of class and of the Peasants’ Revolt (the only explicit mention is a joke in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale about Jack Straw’s men shouting).

Influence

The Tales were the most copied English work of the fifteenth century and among the first printed. Shakespeare drew on the Knight’s Tale for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Dryden, Pope and Wordsworth modernised individual tales. The work’s frame — stories within a journey or gathering — echoes through literature. Pasolini filmed it (1972); Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale (2001) features Chaucer as a gambling-addicted herald; the BBC updated it to modern Britain (2003).

In conversation

• “Experience, though noon auctoritee…” — the Wife of Bath’s claim that lived experience can stand against learned authority.
• “Amor vincit omnia” — the Prioress’s ambiguous brooch: love conquers all, but which love?
• “Radix malorum est cupiditas” — greed is the root of all evil; the Pardoner’s text, preached by the greediest pilgrim.